Simmons Funeral Home

The crowd was sparse and would have been sparser if available deputies hadn’t been there to fill out the ranks. Still, it made for a good photo op with the sheriff up for re-election next month.Then there was the Wes­to­bou festival and an unveiling ceremony for the new public city buses.It was a bad week for the mayor because a thief smashed a window of his truck and stole valuable items while Davis was inside a DeKalb County restaurant for about 10 minutes Thursday.“It was a painful day,” he said, “and the DeKalb police were less than stellar in responding.”The theft was a second unfortunate event to befall the mayor recently, the first being the flooding of his south Augusta home from Tro­pical Storm Hermine rainfall.They say bad luck comes in threes, so it might not be over yet.EVERYBODY WHO’S ANYBODY: When you get dozens of funeral directors in one room, you might expect a somber occasion, but such was not the case at the dinner and roast sponsored by friends and colleagues of former Augusta interim Mayor Willie Mays last Sunday.Laughter prevailed among the crowd of about 500 people there to honor Mays, including his former fellow Augusta commissioners Ulmer Bridges, Jerry Brigham, Bill Kuhlke, Moses Todd, Tommy Boyles and former state Rep. Barbara Sims, as well as 97-year-old former city of Augusta Mayor Pop Neuman, who Mays said taught him some hard lessons as a young city councilman by whipping him at the political game. Years later, when Mays was scoring political victories, someone asked, “What’s happened to you? Pop used to whip up on you all the time.”“If somebody whips you long enough, you learn how to whip somebody else,” Mays said he replied.Other VIPs present included Davis; Augusta commissioners Bill Fen­noy, Dennis Williams, Mari­on Williams, Sammie Sias and Ben Hasan; City Administrator Janice Allen Jackson; former Augusta Fire Chief Ronnie Few; and businessmen James Kendrick and Quincy Robertson.Paul A. Simmons, owner of Simmons Funeral Home in Orangeburg, S.C...